panca kanga
Padawan Learner
In the "Bloodline Trails" topic we had this observation
My first thought was " Yes! if you are getting too much iron in your diet then some thing in your diet that regulates iron uptake might be helpful". In tea that thing is tannin. Its inhibitory effect on iron absorption by the body is about the only thing I "know" about the dietary effects of tannin - it is commonly claimed that it is no use eating spinach for iron because the tannin in the leaf prevents the iron in the plant being used by the body.
There are several references to tannin on this site, though mostly just comments in passing and mostly confirming the idea that it is a bad thing to have in your diet.
A quick look on the web about the dietary effects of tannin gives (of course) conflicting and confusing views.
The intro to a paper in PubMed "Tannins and human health: a review" ends with this comment:
A vast literature of conflicting opinions is not very inspiring to research into.
Here is a comment from a more populist site: _http://www.helium.com/items/2087022-the-health-benefits-and-risks-of-tannins
This sort of opinion gave me cause to think that tannins in a diet need not necessarily be the bad thing I had assumed. With this conclusion I felt free to follow the thread I had picked up from Keit's comment quoted above.
If high absorption levels of iron are a problem for Celtic populations is there any evidence that historically they were mitigating this with dietary tannins? Were they eating any foods with high tannin levels?
As soon as I had read Kiet's thought about tea I had remembered that Robert Graves in The White Goddess had mention several times that acorns were eaten in neolithic/bronze-age Europe. I checked his book, which has been a favourite of mine and found several references. At one point he makes the point that they would have needed some careful preparation to remove the high tannin content that otherwise makes them indigestible and unpleasant tasting.
I can't convince myself that acorns would ever have produced a very pleasant food however it was prepared. The idea seems to have been that the tannin was leached out of them and then they were ground into flour and baked as cakes or bread. Doubtless this was done anciently and I have heard of such a thing being done by country people in England during the 2nd World War while rationing was in force and I don't think it was very popular!
While I was thinking about acorns I could not get out of my head the idea that there might have been other plants with similar properties that could have been used. Without any evidence I had convinced myself that it would be worth checking up about a common weed called Silverweed.
For an example see it here: _http://www.twocrows.co.uk/kaleidescopes/text-pages/silverweed-text.html
You will see that other names include Goosegrass, Goose Tansy, Goosewort. Hence the goose chase
Siverweed is known in the area where I live (The South Downs and Weald of Sussex) as an indicator of ancient habitation. If you find it growing in any abundance it is a good sign that there is a lost neolithic or bronze-age settlement nearby. This is because it was cultivated as a food plant in those times. Perhaps not full-on cultivated, it grows easily and so maybe it was just encouraged to grow nearby - semi-cultivated. It is only a small thing and can't have provided a lot of sustenance though an archaeo-biologist I know suggested there may have been more nutritious strains bred from the wild stock. The nodular root was eaten, again dried and ground into flour to make cakes or breads or roasted whole -- a baked nodule--
There are Scottish recipes to do this and something similar is recorded among the tribes of the Western Seaboard of Canada.
Of course, being a weed and a largely forgotten food there is not much discussion to be found of its nutritional qualities and I did not expect to be able to find out if it held tannins.
But a bit more looking found this site: _http://chestofbooks.com/reference/The-Domestic-Encyclopaedia-Vol4/Silver-Weed.html#.UWSNSFrH7-l
Where they write:
I don't know who Gunner was but I would guess that Gleditsch is a botanist contemporary with Linnaeus. Anyway if Silverweed was used for tanning leather then it contains tannins.
So, (but maybe so what) ancient Celtic populations were making a point of cultivating and eating an insignificant little plant containing a significant level of tannins and maybe this dietary supplement helped them to reduce the amount of iron their bodies were absorbing and so palliate the effects of the HH gene mutation.
This little quote sent me a off in an odd direction, a goose chase even. I thought it was a bit off the original topic so I have started a new one.Keit said:
My first thought was " Yes! if you are getting too much iron in your diet then some thing in your diet that regulates iron uptake might be helpful". In tea that thing is tannin. Its inhibitory effect on iron absorption by the body is about the only thing I "know" about the dietary effects of tannin - it is commonly claimed that it is no use eating spinach for iron because the tannin in the leaf prevents the iron in the plant being used by the body.
There are several references to tannin on this site, though mostly just comments in passing and mostly confirming the idea that it is a bad thing to have in your diet.
A quick look on the web about the dietary effects of tannin gives (of course) conflicting and confusing views.
The intro to a paper in PubMed "Tannins and human health: a review" ends with this comment:
A vast literature of conflicting opinions is not very inspiring to research into.
Here is a comment from a more populist site: _http://www.helium.com/items/2087022-the-health-benefits-and-risks-of-tannins
This sort of opinion gave me cause to think that tannins in a diet need not necessarily be the bad thing I had assumed. With this conclusion I felt free to follow the thread I had picked up from Keit's comment quoted above.
If high absorption levels of iron are a problem for Celtic populations is there any evidence that historically they were mitigating this with dietary tannins? Were they eating any foods with high tannin levels?
As soon as I had read Kiet's thought about tea I had remembered that Robert Graves in The White Goddess had mention several times that acorns were eaten in neolithic/bronze-age Europe. I checked his book, which has been a favourite of mine and found several references. At one point he makes the point that they would have needed some careful preparation to remove the high tannin content that otherwise makes them indigestible and unpleasant tasting.
I can't convince myself that acorns would ever have produced a very pleasant food however it was prepared. The idea seems to have been that the tannin was leached out of them and then they were ground into flour and baked as cakes or bread. Doubtless this was done anciently and I have heard of such a thing being done by country people in England during the 2nd World War while rationing was in force and I don't think it was very popular!
While I was thinking about acorns I could not get out of my head the idea that there might have been other plants with similar properties that could have been used. Without any evidence I had convinced myself that it would be worth checking up about a common weed called Silverweed.
For an example see it here: _http://www.twocrows.co.uk/kaleidescopes/text-pages/silverweed-text.html
You will see that other names include Goosegrass, Goose Tansy, Goosewort. Hence the goose chase
Siverweed is known in the area where I live (The South Downs and Weald of Sussex) as an indicator of ancient habitation. If you find it growing in any abundance it is a good sign that there is a lost neolithic or bronze-age settlement nearby. This is because it was cultivated as a food plant in those times. Perhaps not full-on cultivated, it grows easily and so maybe it was just encouraged to grow nearby - semi-cultivated. It is only a small thing and can't have provided a lot of sustenance though an archaeo-biologist I know suggested there may have been more nutritious strains bred from the wild stock. The nodular root was eaten, again dried and ground into flour to make cakes or breads or roasted whole -- a baked nodule--
There are Scottish recipes to do this and something similar is recorded among the tribes of the Western Seaboard of Canada.
Of course, being a weed and a largely forgotten food there is not much discussion to be found of its nutritional qualities and I did not expect to be able to find out if it held tannins.
But a bit more looking found this site: _http://chestofbooks.com/reference/The-Domestic-Encyclopaedia-Vol4/Silver-Weed.html#.UWSNSFrH7-l
Where they write:
I don't know who Gunner was but I would guess that Gleditsch is a botanist contemporary with Linnaeus. Anyway if Silverweed was used for tanning leather then it contains tannins.
So, (but maybe so what) ancient Celtic populations were making a point of cultivating and eating an insignificant little plant containing a significant level of tannins and maybe this dietary supplement helped them to reduce the amount of iron their bodies were absorbing and so palliate the effects of the HH gene mutation.
